Well we are almost ready for the evening.

There was a brief cock up first thing when I pulled into the car park of The Community Centre in New Ferry and was able to remind myself that The Farmer’s market is the second Saturday of the month and not the first. I parked there anyway and got the leg of lamb and chicken from Edge & Sons. The chicken is for tomorrow’s lunch and has spent the day steeped in a sweet tea flavoured brine.

I have stuffed the lamb with rosemary and garlic and provided it doesn’t pour down with rain over the next hour or so I am going to roast it in the barbeque. The recipe comes from a book of Tuscan cooking called Beaneaters & bread soup which I picked up a couple of years ago in the Oxfam bookshop in Oxford.

It is full of robust artery bursting cooking; things like sweet & sour wild boar and ribbon pasta with a duck sauce. They suggest that ten minutes or so before the lamb is taken away from the heat it is smeared with halves of ripe tomato.

Before the lamb we will be eating aubergines with garlic, olive oil and feta and some sour dough smoked bread from the grocers.

In the grocers this morning I chatted again to Kazim. He was asking about the law and if I enjoyed it. ‘Do something else’ he said. ‘ Do something you enjoy.’

We’ll have roast potatoes with red peppers with the lamb and after that plums.

There has been a glut of plums this year and the branches of the tree are hanging down heavy with the,. I have cooked them in red wine and sugar flavoured with cinnamon and a few bruised pepper corns. I then cooked the wine down to a syrup.

We should be full at the end of all that.